In June, 2013 the attraction of cloud computing solutions for larger businesses and comparably sized organizations in the public sector does not look to be abating anytime soon. The real driver, as we see it, is the comparatively lower cost of these computing options. The pay-as-you-go format of monthly, and annual cloud computing subscription offers is too compelling. The U.S. federal “Cloud First” initiative, in 2013, is an example of how these organizations have taken to the idea of the kind of “multi-tenant” computing offered by these services.

Even the threat of security vulnerabilities will not act as a significant deterrent to interest in cloud computing options on the part of these prospects. We were literally shocked to see an organization as sophisticated, and committed to a necessary clandestine nature of day to day business activity, as the U.S. CIA not only seriously consider, but actually award a $600MM, multi-year contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Presumably they could find no difference in quality between the AWS bid and rivals (for example, IBM) with a much longer history of working with the U.S. federal government on similar projects. AWS has successfully transformed the brand of Amazon from simply the biggest online retailer of just about any hard goods item one can imagine, to a brand more consistent with an ultra sophisticated (not to mention experienced) computer services provider.

So it is safe to conclude cloud services offers are highly attractive in enterprise computing markets in 2013. Just to mention a last, but nevertheless extremely important contributor to the attractiveness of these services, let’s look for a moment at the cloud subscription offer of an opportunity for customers to rapidly build computing infrastructure, and, as required, dispense with it, as they need. AWS and its competitors (for example, Microsoft® Azure) offer customers “instant” infrastructure. It doesn’t take a lot of consideration to understand the promise of tremendous cost savings implicit to this brand moniker (otherwise known as “elastic” infrastructure). Customers can literally forget about buying lots of servers when they can opt to subscribe to this type of service.

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